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AE Color Issues (I know, I know…)
I’m posting this in both the AE forums for more attention. I’m running a Mac with CS3 and FCP6.
I’ve had that classic trouble of AE exports seeming darker than I’d expect. The past two days I’ve been reading through virtually every post on the matter. The typical “exported AE footage looks darker than original FCP footage” seemed to be what I was experiencing. So I took everyone’s advice: downloaded the CS3 8.0.2 update, went to Project Settings and checked “Match Legacy…”, and even played around with AE using the color profile of my monitors (calibrated with SypderPro).
My issue, to be specific, is that I have two graphics that come from the same source but don’t match up. I have a vector-based logo “PBW.ai” that I placed into a clean white Photoshop image, then saved it out as a tiff. I then used the same “PBW.ai” file to create an animated logo in After Effects. They looked the same, color-wise until I export it. But then I noticed something.
In the info panel of both AE and PS, the color is different for the same “PBW.ai” file. In PhotoShop, the blue in the logo measures at 0, 122, 195 RGB (respectively). But in AfterEffects, the blue measures at 9, 91, 166 RGB (respectively). The comp in PhotoShop is made from placing the “PBW.ai” file directly into a NTSC Widescreen preset. The comp in After Effects was made from importing the “PBW.ai” file and dragging it over the comp button to create a new comp with the same attributes, etc.
The “PBW.ai” file was created from an EPS file named “PBW_CMYK.eps”. I just saved as an Adobe Illustrator document, and did not embed ICC profiles.
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4 Replies
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Check to see that the files are being interpreted correctly—i.e., that they have the correct input color profiles assigned.
See “Interpret a footage item by assigning an input color profile”.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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[Michael Cummins] “The “PBW.ai” file was created from an EPS file named “PBW_CMYK.eps”. I just saved as an Adobe Illustrator document, and did not embed ICC profiles.”
I’m curious, did you convert this AI document to RGB before you started working with it in Photoshop/AE?
Darby Edelen
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In short, no. Knowing that CMYK and RGB were two different color profiles, I looked for a “convert to RGB” option in the adobe export dialog, but couldn’t find anything similar. I figured it’d come around to bite me in the end, but haven’t been able to specifically nail my problem solely on that.
In other news, I seem to have fixed my problem. Watching one of the videos on Adobe’s site, I saw where you could simulate different outputs. I found that once I added the comp to the render queue, opened the “Output Module Settings”, hit the “Color Management” tab, I could choose different output profiles. “sRGB IEC61966-2.1” gave me an exact color match to the PhotoShop file once I imported them both into FCP.
So if I have AfterEffects exporting with the sRGB profile, but my monitors are both running on a custom-calibrated profile, am I shooting myself in the foot anywhere here?
I might have to take this to another forum….
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[Michael Cummins] “So if I have AfterEffects exporting with the sRGB profile, but my monitors are both running on a custom-calibrated profile, am I shooting myself in the foot anywhere here?”
Your monitor calibration should generally not be used as a working profile or output profile. Custom monitor profiles are specific to the display you’re working on and are useful because they should allow your display to accurately represent colors.
For example, a display could have overly saturated reds when using the default sRGB profile. If you set up a custom profile for this display it should ideally reduce the saturation of the reds when displayed on your monitor to match with some pre-defined visual standard (determined by your calibration system).
However, you don’t want to use this profile as a working space in AE because it could reduce the saturation of the reds in your output and the result could have heavily desaturated reds on a display that uses the default sRGB profile accurately.
There are usually several profiles involved in a color managed workflow and they can interact in different ways depending on your preview and output settings.
If you’re getting the results you need, then your workflow sounds solid 🙂 As always, check it on a broadcast monitor.
Darby Edelen
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